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Our Verdict

For

Against

LED awkwardly placed

The new Iomega eGo Mac drive is certainly more attractive than its predecessor, which looked like a hightech hipflask.

It's light and portable too, and offers USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 connectivity, with a cable for each bundled with the drive. The USB 2.0 cable offers twin heads, so if a single USB port isn't enough to power your eGo, you can use two.

It comes with a backup software suite for you to download from the internet if you're so inclined, is preformatted for Mac OS and includes Iomega's trademarked Drop Guard feature to protect it against falls. But how does it perform?

Benchmarks

In our benchmark tests it achieved some very solid results, offering random read and write speeds of 9.9 and 13.3 MB/sec respectively under USB.

Connecting through FireWire 400 saw a small but significant increase to 10.3 and 14.4 MB/sec, rising to 13.6 MB/sec random read and 15.5 MB/sec random write speeds under FireWire 800. Copying a single file of 1.08GB took 20 seconds under FireWire 800, and 40 seconds through USB 2.0.

These figures won't set the world alight, but they hold their own with drives that cost more per GB.

There's little to complain about here. The LED showing when the drive is being accessed is a little awkwardly placed at the rear of the unit, but it's bright enough to see reflected on your desk.

A 320GB triple-interface drive at this price is great value, and there's a 500GB model for under £100.